Shocked finds a calling in gospel music.

Byline: Serena Markstrom The Register-Guard

It should not surprise anyone who's followed her journey that Michelle Shocked would come out with a gospel album. If you know how adamant Shocked has been against doing live recordings, then the real surprise is that "ToHeaven-URide," is a live album.

Shocked's youthful roots were in the anarchist and punk scene in New York City and San Francisco. She climbed to fame in folk circles, first landing on the British charts while basically launching a 25-year career without her consent.

Shocked has since had a pattern of jumping styles. She has recorded everything from swing to reggae, although her signature song, "Anchorage," is firmly in the folk tradition.

Although the artist is touring with her new gospel release, when she comes to the Shedd on Monday it won't be exclusively to perform gospel music and she said she rarely comes away from a performance without playing "Anchorage."

The circumstances surrounding "ToHeavenURide" are unusual for a singer who is a longtime performer's rights activist. At the time, she was battling a major label, settling out of court with Mercury Records and winning the rights to control her catalog.

When reached by telephone in Los Angeles, where she now resides full time, Shocked said she didn't know anyone was recording when she performed at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival June 22, 2003. Her contract explicitly said no recording - something she requires because of her history of bootlegged recordings of her music getting out.

Her first hit was recorded by someone posing as a journalist at the Kerrville Folk Festival and eventually releasing it on a European label, Cooking Vinyl. It's still in circulation today.

The Telluride festival traditionally hosts a Sunday gospel hour, or some sort of spiritual unification for festival-goers. Shocked, a born-again Christian who has long admired gospel music and sings in a church choir in Los Angeles, was happy to accept the invitation.

"Thank you all so much. What an answered prayer it is to be here today," she says on Track 13, "Answered Prayer Rap." "I was given this vision. I was given this vision and 10 years ago when this vision came to me it didn't seem like it was even possible.

"The fact that it has come to fulfillment today is just ..." (background vocalist says "oh hallelujah" as Shocked trails off).

"I want to give thanks to God, but I also want to give some thanks to a great visionary here at Telluride, Mr. Craig Ferguson (festival director) for asking us to be a part of this.

"Do I look like a gospel singer??... That took some vision and I am so pleased to be here with all of my friends."

During the interview, Shocked described sitting on her porch almost four years after that performance listening to a random shuffle on her iPod, which held the board recording of the Telluride performance. She had it there "for reference," not because she ever imagined the raw material for a live release was out there.

A singer caught her attention. "I thought she sounded really good," Shocked said. "And it was me.

"I had the board tape and the memory of that gig and I remember it being a good gig," she said.

Shocked said she also remembers seeing the "fancy recording trucks" but not thinking about it in terms of her own performance. Ferguson's vision merged with that innocuous recording project, for the festival's archives, to make it possible for Shocked to release her first live album on her own label, Mighty Sound.

Shocked's manager got in touch with the festival, but they believed it was a long shot that the festival would have a higher quality recording. After all, her contract explicitly forbade it.

"They sent it to me on a hard drive," she said. When she got it she thought, "We really have something here.

"I don't like live recordings," she said, referring to why she's avoided releasing any. But she likes this one.

"This vision is too big to be logical to me or anyone else. If it is a spirit-led vision, none of us know where this is going."

A fundamentalist upbringing

Shocked was raised in a Mormon fundamentalist household. She left home at age 16.

After putting herself through college in Texas and getting ready to start a new job, she had what professionals called a psychotic episode. Her mom had her committed to the psychiatric ward at the same Texas hospital where she was born.

Some bios say she changed her name to Michelle Shocked because of shock treatment she got at the hospital. But she told an audience at a National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy conference in 2003 that it was a play on "shell shocked" - a comment that in 1984 she attributed her emotional sensitivities to being conditioned by the "social climate of the Cold War - the paranoia, the sense of the enemy at the gate," she says in the speech.

She found religion - in church

Her religious conversion came about a decade later.

"As a young person, you see so much hypocrisy, both in the doctrine and in the actual conduct," she says in the speech. "Those things had offended my sensibilities so deeply that my solution was to believe that I could reject entirely, whole cloth, everything that I had been indoctrinated with."

She started attending a church in Los Angeles in 1992, looking for the roots of blues and R & B. At first, she thought the gospel choir would be a greater experience if it weren't for all the Jesus trappings.

"And I tell people, I just went one Sunday too often," she says in the speech. "Then one Sunday, in the true Christian sense, he touched my heart and I walked down to the altar and was saved, redeemed, forgiven, and all my sins were washed away."

The first lines of her "Womanifesto" are, "Ask me about my religion/ Of course, no one ever does."

So I asked her about her religion. She said she's reluctant to use the "bully pulpit" of being a performer to talk about it, but at the same time doesn't want to shy away from what she considers to be a spiritual mission.

Shocked said she has been in the choir since 2005, and it has changed her as a performer.

"I can't sing folk songs anymore," she said. "Before I had this (religious conversion) I feel like I was wearing a mask or a costume.

"The songs are the same, but I have changed.?... I honestly wish I could say it was technique.

"I have been blessed to receive an anointing, not talent, but a gift. God saying, `I want you for this purpose.'?"

Call Serena Markstrom at 338-2371 or e-mail her at [e-mail].

Concert preview

Michelle Shocked

What: Singer-songwriter performing whatever she feels like

When: 7:30 p.m. Monday

Where: The John G. Shedd Institute for the Arts, 285 E. Broadway

Tickets: $22 to $30

On the Web: Listen to samples from "ToHeavenURide" at www?.rgweb.registerguard.com